Seen from the air, Alberta's "industrial forest" is a patchwork of access roads, pumping pads, collection and transmission stations -- and telltale seismic lines, which are avenues ripped through the forest by earthmovers so that explosives can be used to find oil and gas deposits.

Already, Alberta supplies about 42 percent of California's natural gas, roughly 700 billion cubic feet a year. And imports from Canada are expected to an ever more vital part of California's -- and the nation's -- energy future.

That's partly because of environmental concerns at home. Congress has recently raised new obstacles to energy exploration in the United States -- blocking new drilling on land designated as national monuments and scaling back a major offshore project in the eastern Gulf of Mexico.

Canada's environmental laws regulating oil and gas exploration are lax by U. S. standards. Nowhere is that more evident than in the boreal forest.

Circumpolar in distribution, the boreal forest is the largest forest ecosystem in the world, covering 11 percent of the planet's land mass. It is one of the planet's great wildlife resources, teeming with rare mammals such as woodland caribou, lynx, musk oxen and grizzly bears.

The maze of marshes, sloughs and ponds that wends through the boreal forest is a gigantic waterfowl and shorebird factory, a nesting ground for tens of millions of birds of scores of different species. It is also crucial brooding habitat for neotropical songbirds that nest in North America and winter in South America.

But while it's big, it's also vulnerable. Russia and Canada in particular are rushing to exploit the rich natural resources of their boreal regions.

Timber harvesting and conversion of land for agriculture are also grand in scope. By one measure, the boreal forest is currently losing land to agriculture at a faster rate than the Brazilian rain forest did in the 1970s.

Still, gas exploration presents the most immediate and visible threat to much of the boreal forest, particularly in Alberta and the Northwest Territories.

The forest for miles in any direction outside Red Earth -- a hamlet of a few buildings at a dirt crossroads -- is virtually unpopulated. But the entire region is threaded with roads built by energy companies.

Hundreds of gas and oil wells dot the landscape, each situated on a 2- to 4- acre pad carved out of the forest. There are also scores of "batteries" -- collection and transmission stations for gas, each comprising 10 or more acres of buildings, sheds, tanks and pipe works.

Drive anywhere in this strange industrial wilderness and pull over: Along with the sough of the wind in the aspen leaves and the haunting cry of the loons, the sound of compressors and generators can always be heard, sometimes near, sometimes far.

The industrial activities in the forest already may be having a malignant effect on the area's wildlife.

"We're seeing an alarming decline of some duck species that prefer to nest in the boreal forest, specifically scaups and scoters," said Stuart Slatterly, a biologist with Ducks Unlimited who is conducting waterfowl nest surveys in the sprawling forested wetlands of Canada's Northwest Territories.

"Scaup were once very common, but they began declining in the mid-1970s," Slatterly said. "We're now seeing the lowest continental populations since surveys started in 1955. We don't know if it's related (to oil and gas) activity yet -- we're just starting to collect the data."

The Canadian oil and gas industry, however, denies it is insensitive to the environment.

Pointing to the abundant wildlife in Alberta's industrial forest, industry representatives contend that the situation isn't all that bad -- and that in any event, safeguards are tightening up.

Technology, Stringham said, is the key to reducing the oil industry's footprint in the boreal forest. While heavy equipment is typically used to cut seismic lines 10 or 15 feet wide, more and more the industry is switching to narrow hand-cut lines, he said.

"We're drilling horizontally for up to nine kilometers, so we need fewer drilling and pumping sites," he added. "We're now working with the timber companies to put roads to bed and replant production areas after we've removed the oil and gas."

One thing's for sure, Stringham acknowledged: Given the surging demand for natural gas, it's unlikely the hydrocarbon industry will abandon the boreal forest.

"Demand is pulling the supply on this, and that's not going to change," Stringham said. "We have a lot of natural gas up here -- as much as 335 trillion cubic feet in the Northwest Territories, with 323 trillion cubic feet on the Arctic and east coasts."

Indeed, during the past few years, the oil and gas exploration has extended "north of 60," as Canadians say -- north of 60th parallel, which separates the prairie provinces from the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

Only 43,000 people live in the Northwest Territories, which is roughly the size of the Rocky Mountain states and the Pacific Northwest combined -- and most of them live in the towns of Yellowknife, Hay River, Norman Wells and Inuvik.

From a small plane, the forest stretches out from horizon to horizon, broken up by escarpments and sprawling wetland complexes. Yet it is not exactly trackless -- huge regions are a spiderweb of seismic lines.

It might not be too long before this area resembles the forest near Red Earth. Artificial islands support gas wells in the McKenzie River, the great waterway that drains much of the Northwest Territories.

Each winter -- when the ground is frozen and heavy equipment can move across the iced-over bogs, lakes and muskeg -- the network of seismic lines grows, seemingly exponentially. Last winter, close to 60,000 kilometers of seismic lines were cut in the McKenzie River delta alone.

The petroleum industry isn't the only potential threat to Canada's boreal forest. Agriculture and logging are also impinging on the northern woodlands.

Timber harvesting in the boreal forest is huge in scope. Canada has leased millions of acres of forest to timber companies that cut the trees for pulp and lumber.

Gary Stewart, a biologist for Ducks Unlimited Canada and the leader of a research project on boreal waterfowl, said that the conversion of the forest to agricultural land is even more troublesome than logging -- especially south of the 60th parallel, in the prairie provinces, including Alberta.

"Agriculture is exploding, and its effects are long-term and insidious," he said. "Once the woodland goes into wheat, canola or barley, it doesn't come back. At least the timber companies replant and restore their roadways to forest -- I think we can work with them."

The threats to the boreal forest are therefore varied. But given the insatiable demand for fossil fuels in the United States, the rush for hydrocarbons is likely to garner the most intensive scrutiny in the near future.

Stewart, for one, believes that even small adjustments in the way oil and gas are obtained could help prevent additional scarring of the landscape.

"You have dozens of different companies up here exploring, and each one of them will run their own seismic line for the same area," he said. "If they just shared their data, you could get by with one line instead of 20. That would make a big difference."

NORTHERN HEMISPHERE'S BOREAL FOREST

-- Abundant resources . . . The boreal forest, shown at left with a portion enlarged below, is the largest forest ecosystem in the world, encompassing much of Canada and Russia. The Canadian boreal forest's supply of natural gas has been estimated at 658 trillion cubic feet, split almost evenly between deposits in the Northwest Territories and the Arctic and east coasts. Agriculture and heavy logging are other industrial uses.

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... but a habitat facing destruction The boreal forest provides habitat for such rare large mammals as musk oxen, grizzly bears and woodland caribou. Its wetlands are home to migrating waterfowl and tens of millions of other birds. Yet the forest already is losing land to agriculture more rapidly than the Brazilian rain forest in the 1970s. Hundreds of gas and oil wells dot the landscape near Red Earth, Alberta, and there has been a steep decline in duck species. The oil industry in Alberta contends that safeguards are continuously improving and that technological advances will reduce the industrial impact on the boreal forest.